Уильям Моэм - The Narrow Corner

“Gettin’ beyond a joke,” bellowed the skipper.

“Any islands near?”

“Yep. If we can keep goin’ for a couple of hours we can get under their lee.”

“What about reefs?”

“There ain’t any marked. Moon’ll be out soon. You two chaps better go below.”

“I’ll stay on deck,” said Fred. “Stuffy in the cabin.”

“Please yourself. What about you, doc?”

The doctor hesitated. He hated the look of the angry sea and he was bored with being frightened. He had died so many deaths that he had exhausted his emotion.

“Can I be any use?”

“No more than a snowball in ’ell.”

“Remember you carry Cæsar and his fortunes,” he shouted in the skipper’s ear.

But Captain Nichols, not having had a classical education, did not see the point of the jest. If I perish, I perish, the doctor reflected, and he made up his mind to get all the enjoyment he could out of what might be his last hours on earth. He went forwards to fetch Ah Kay. The boy followed him back and came down with him into the cabin.

“Let’s try Kim Ching’s chandu,” said Dr. Saunders. “No need to stint ourselves to–night.”

The boy got the lamp and the opium from the valise, and with his accustomed nonchalance started to prepare the pipe. Never had the first long inhalation seemed more delicious. They smoked alternately. Gradually peace descended upon the doctor’s soul. His nerves ceased to tingle with the roll of the lugger. Fear left him. After the usual six pipes that the doctor smoked every night Ah Kay lay back as if he had finished.

“Not yet,” said Dr. Saunders softly. “For once I’m going the whole hog.”

The motion of the boat was not unpleasant. Little by little it seemed to him that he grasped its rhythm. It was only his carcase that was tossed from side to side, his spirit soared in regions far above the storm. He walked in the infinite, but he knew, before Einstein, that it was bounded by his own thought. He knew once more that he had but to stretch his intelligence ever so little to solve a great mystery; and again he did not do it because it gave him more pleasure to know that it was there waiting to be solved. It had agreeably tantalized him so long, it was indelicate, when any moment might be his last, to ravish its secret. He was like a well–bred man who will not expose his mistress to the humiliation of knowing that he does not believe her lies. Ah Kay fell asleep, curled up at the foot of the mattress. Dr. Saunders moved a little so as not to disturb him. He thought of God and of eternity, and he laughed softly, in his heart, at the absurdity of life. Scraps of poetry floated in his memory. It seemed to him that he was dead already and Captain Nichols, Charon in a tarpaulin, was bearing him to a strange, sweet place. At last he fell asleep also.

HE was awakened by the chill of the dawn. He opened his eyes and saw that the companion hatch was open, and then he was aware of the skipper and Fred Blake sleeping on their mattresses. They had come down and left the hatch open on account of the pungent smell of the opium. Suddenly it occurred to him that the lugger rolled no longer. He raised himself. He felt a trifle heavy, for he was unaccustomed to smoke so much, and he thought he would get into the air. Ah Kay was resting peacefully where he had fallen asleep. He touched him on the shoulder. The boy opened his eyes and his lips broke immediately into the slow smile that gave such beauty to his young face. He stretched himself and yawned.

“Get me some tea,” said the doctor.

Ah Kay was on his feet in a minute. The doctor followed him up the companion. The sun had not yet risen and one pale star still loitered in the sky, but the night had thinned to a ghostly grey, and the ketch seemed to float on the surface of a cloud. The man at the helm in an old coat, with a muffler round his neck and a battered hat crammed down on his head, gave the doctor a surly nod. The sea was quite calm. They were passing between two islands so close together that they might have been sailing down a canal. There was a very light breeze. The blackfellow at the helm seemed half asleep. The dawn slid between the low, wooded islands, gravely, with a deliberate calmness that seemed to conceal an inward apprehension, and you felt it natural and even inevitable that men should have personified it in a maiden. It had indeed the shyness and the grace of a young girl, the charming seriousness, the indifference and the ruthlessness. The sky had the washed–out colour of an archaic statue. The virgin forests on each side of them still held the night, but then insensibly the grey of the sea was shot with the soft hues of a pigeon’s breast. There was a pause, and with a smile the day broke. Sailing between those uninhabited islands, on that still sea, in a silence that caused you almost to hold your breath, you had a strange and exciting impression of the beginning of the world. There man might never have passed and you had a feeling that what your eyes saw had never been seen before. You had a sensation of primeval freshness, and all the complication of the generations disappeared. A stark simplicity, as bare and severe as a straight line, filled the soul with rapture. Dr. Saunders knew at that moment the ecstasy of the mystic.

Ah Kay brought him a cup of tea, jasmine–scented, and scrambling down from the spiritual altitudes on which for an instant he had floated he made himself comfortable, as in an arm–chair, in the bliss of a material enjoyment. The air was cool but balmy. He asked for nothing but to go on for ever in that boat sailing on an even keel between green islands.

When he had been sitting there an hour, delighting in his ease, he heard steps on the companion, and Fred Blake came on deck. In his pyjamas, with his tousled hair, he looked very young, and as was natural to his age he had awakened fresh, with all the lines smoothed out of his face, and not puckered and wrinkled and time–worn as sleep had left the doctor.

“Up early, doctor?” He noticed the empty cup. “I wonder if I can get a cup of tea.”

“Ask Ah Kay.”

“All right. I’ll just get Utan to throw a couple of buckets of water over me.”

He went forward and spoke to one of the men. The doctor saw the blackfellow lower a bucket by a rope into the sea, and then Fred Blake stripped his pyjamas and stood on deck naked while the other threw the contents over him. The bucket was lowered again and Fred turned round. He was tall, with square shoulders, a small waist and slender hips; his arms and neck were tanned, but the rest of his body was very white. He dried himself, and putting on his pyjamas again came aft. His eyes were shining and on his lips was the outline of a smile.

“You’re a very good–looking young fellow,” said the doctor.

Fred gave an indifferent shrug of the shoulders and sank into the next chair.

“We lost a boat in the night. D’you know that?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Blew like the devil. We’ve lost the jib. Just torn to tatters. Nichols wasn’t half glad to get into the shelter of the islands, I can tell you. I thought we’d never make it.”

“Did you stay up on deck all the time?”

“Yes, I thought if we foundered I’d rather be in the open.”

“There wouldn’t have been much chance for you.”

“No, I know that.”

“Weren’t you afraid?”

“No. You know, I think if it’s coming to you, it’ll come. And there’s nothing to do about it.”

“I was frightened.”

“Nichols said you were in the afternoon. He thought it a hell of a joke.”

“It’s a question of age, you know. The old are much more easily frightened than the young. I couldn’t help thinking it rather funny at the time that I, who had so much less to lose than you who’ve got all your life before you, should dread losing it so much more than you did.”